Anxiety, insecurity, depression and low self-esteem have all been identified by researchers as symptoms common among text-addicted teenagers.

Note: these are also symptoms commonly associated with that period of development known as adolescence but teenagers, of course, should be oblivious to such matters.

A technology researcher has discovered a number of disorders linked to texting. Yep, you heard right, a technology researcher.

Dr [Jennie] Carroll said her study into the effects of modern communication had found four distinct disorders – textaphrenia, textiety, post-traumatic text disorder and binge texting.

She also mentions related developments from Japan.

“There were reports from Japan of ‘repetitive thumb syndrome’ and of young people’s thumbs growing in response to too much texting, leading to ‘monster thumbs’.”

The generational divide may not be growing, but it kind of looks that way with every generation, doesn’t it?

One little matter, where’s hyper sexting disorder!? In some projected future edition of a Diagnostic and Statistical Texting Manual or DSTM!?

The assumption here seems to be that we’re dealing with mainly good little teenagers as the subject of sexting never comes up once during the course of the entire article. Praise the lord! Mom and Dad must have downloaded Cyber Nanny. The kids will have to do what they are probably doing anyway, as the need arises, and resorting to computers outside of the home.

Yep, sometimes life is just a matter of slipping out from under the noses of Mom and Dad. If teenagers can’t manage that, I feel certain an accommodating therapist can be found.

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Our obnoxious Prime Minister recently got booted out by his own senators and replaced. Elections are coming up soon so the opposition are promising billions of dollars to be spent on mental health care if elected.

This has resulted in an opportunity for McGorry, the teen drugger, to once again clamour for credibility.

I’ve been reading a little about what’s going on in Australia, and it is worrisome. Some people in your country would be campaigning to spend more money on what would amount to raising the number of people psychiatrically labeled while claiming to be doing so in the name of prevention. This is much like the proposed psychosis risk syndrome for the DSM-5. It ain’t broken, but we better fix it before it is broken. Funny thing, people get worse the harder we try to fix them, and then treatment (i.e. brokeness) becomes their career path and lifestyle. Shucks, look at all the poor poor pitiful incurable cusses.

I hadn’t heard psychiatrists were trying to diagnose through blog texts, comments, forum discussions, etc. They don’t have far to go to do so when its a person speaking about their own “disability” as so many people on the web are prone to do. The art of undiagnosis is still in its infancy as compared with the art of diagnosis.

Obsessive texting has been seen as a ‘mental disorder’, but that’s got to be as absurd as calling obsessive telephoning a ‘mental disorder’. It is very related, in fact, as text messaging is so often done on a mobile phone. I think you could probably say, without contradiction, that adolescent girls are the population most frequently beset by this disorder. If we keep proceeding in the direction we are going in theoretically, soon we will have reached ‘female gender disorder’. She can’t help it. She was born that way.

PS.
The opposition leader is a staunch Catholic. He is probably of the view that more suicides is better than less if those suicides have been declared and blessed as resulting from mental illness. That way at least the poor souls will gain admittance to heaven

I had not heard of any priests blessing suicides, nor of excusing the act due to the perpetuator/victim’s alleged mental illness. As far as I’ve heard suicide is still a way to be denied admittance into heaven according to the Catholic faith and, if this suicide is found out, it’s a way of being denied burial in a Catholic cemetery as well.

The problem with high suicide rates in localities is that given the sense of urgency and panic involved they become excuses for mental health screening. This mental health screening raises the mental illness rate, and the higher mental illness rates in turn increases the overall number of suicides. Doing nothing is doing more. The suicide rate was usually on its way back down, or towards leveling off, before such interventions sent it climbing skyward as they are inevitably doomed to do.

Increase the number of people labeled mentally ill, and you increase the number of suicidal people in the world. Suicidal ideation is considered a symptom of some types of serious mental illness. The fact that there may be a certain amount of logic involved in these decisions to commit self-murder is not something psychiatry is prepared to deal with. Psychiatrists don’t resolve spiritual crises, philosophical disputes, or social dilemmas, no, they are only trained to deal drugs. It is my belief that some of these doctors should be trained to see and treat the whole person rather than simply ‘the disease’. The person is invariably real; ‘the disease’, a matter of conjecture and theory.

People in psychiatric treatment in the USA are dying at an age on average 25 years younger than the rest of the population. This early death is due primarily to the drugs used in the treatment of what are thought to be serious mental disorders. These psychiatric drugs cause a metabolic syndrome associated with numerous life threatening health complications. Some people call this circumstance a trade off (emotional stability for longitivity), other people call it murder (years alive for death).